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The present invention relates generally to a system and apparatus for verifying central office routing transactions in a telephone communications network from a remote location, and more particularly to a system and apparatus for verifying central office billing and routing translations in a telephone communications network from a remote location.
Telephone communications networks often require that the carrier verify the office billing and routing of a telephone call. Verification is necessary not only to insure that the call will reach the appropriate destination, but also to insure proper billing. Improper routing of calls may be caused by translation or wiring errors, depending on the type of office. Verification of billing and routing is necessary, for example, before a new central office switch is cut into service either replacing an existing switch or establishing new service.
A system for verifying the routing of a telephone call is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,937,850 (Borbas et al.) commonly assigned with the present application. U.S. Pat. No. 4,937,850 is incorporated herein by reference. The system disclosed in this patent, however, does not provide any means for verifying the billing translations. Translations are a highly complex set of instructions that define billing and other switching functions based on class of service, access codes, and other settings that are unique to each office or switching station. Classes of service are, for example, POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), Business, Hotel/Motel, Coin, PBX (Plant Board Extension). There are many thousands of such translations and each group of translations is subject to frequent revisions and changes. As a result, the possibility of errors in the billing is quite large. The magnitude of the translations in error may range from inconsequential to extremely costly.
In the past, telephone companies have depended on customer billing complaints to identify translation billing problems. Unfortunately, customers are much less apt to complain about calls that they should have been billed for and weren't than the reverse. In addition, recently, billing complaints are being registered by long distance carriers that may involve many thousands of calls. Telephone companies in the past have been ill equipped to respond to such complaints since there is no easy and reliable way to check the translations. In the past, the verification process has consisted of manual dialing of each access code, by individual class of service, followed by the line-by-line checking of the billing output. This verification process is extremely time-consuming and error prone.
Therefore, it would be desirable to develop a system which eliminates the hours of tedious and tiresome manual effort of the presently used methods and offers and accurate gauge to refute billing complaints from long distance carriers and other users. It would also be desirable to provide a system with these capabilities which is relatively inexpensive and which has the capacity to check a large number of lines from a central office. It would also be desirable that the system have the capability of checking or verifying the billing and routing from a remote location.
Therefore in view of the above, it is a primary object of the present invention to provide a system and apparatus for automatically verifying central office billing and routing translations
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system and apparatus for automatically verifying billing and routing translations at a central office from a remote location.